so once upon a time in ancient India
they say that once upon a time in
ancient India they say that when a
storyteller would die they would take a
scene and place it in his mouth and then
buried him on the ground and from his
body a beautiful big banyan tree would
emerge and people would gather under it
and tell stories for ages in a kiss you
on now stories are as old as mankind
itself right we're here today telling
each other stories from around the world
stories have been carved they'd been
scratched they've been painted printed
in 20 wood bamboo ivory and other bones
stories have been painted on Fox live in
finntroll stone we etched stories into
palm leaves we sang stories we painted
stories on canvas we've recorded them as
firm and finally now we store them
electronically in their digital form and
it's really this digital book then I'm
here to talk to you about so it's a
great deal of excitement about these new
digital bazaars the the digital market
but somehow when I think of markets I
think of piles of color I think of the
smell of fish of cows of walking through
ancient corridors and as I travel across
the world I always make sure to go to a
market in Paris I found you know vintage
lace and and French perfume in Berlin I
bought myself some nice industrial boots
and a nice leather jacket but somehow
somehow when our market shift from the
streets to our smartphones everything
becomes very plain everything looks very
you know web 2.21 very vanilla and this
made me really angry like where all the
artisans in the digital bazaars where
are the craftspeople where's the culture
why have our digital bazaars degraded to
something so plain so this is one of the
many things that I actually didn't like
about technology so I went to a school
with
hundreds of trees we had Panthers we had
monkeys but we didn't use computers ever
and I think I became a little bit of a
technophobe in this environment I i
started illustrating books for children
when I was 16 because I didn't want to
grow into this world of of usability and
functionality and rationality I wanted
to stay I want to stay a child and I did
I thought what was so beautiful about
illustrating books for kids is that each
page would become this paper boat that
would take me into a world where
anything could happen you know lovers we
lighted and crews would speak and so I
lost myself and these worlds for a while
ah
but I had painted everything I painted
buses I painted you know walls across
India I design stages but the one thing
that I totally avoided was technology so
one night when I was traveling in the
desert and a starry sky i was in
conversation with the sufi called Mukti
airily about how nothing had changed
since the time of the ancient indian
epics so back then when I was Indians
wanted to travel we jump into our
chariots and with zoom across the sky
and now we do the same with aeroplanes
back then when um warriors were thirsty
they take out a arrow and they'd shoot
it into the ground and water would come
out and now we do the same drills and
machines and so the conclusion that we
came to was that magic had been replaced
by machinery and this made me really
really really sad and it it have to be
like that right if anything technology
should enable magic not kill it when I
was little girl my that's me my
grandfather gave ls1 my first paintings
my grandfather gave me his little silver
pocket watch and this piece of I don't
know 80 year old technology was the most
magical thing I'd ever seen it was
handcrafted it had all these like silver
etchings of of deer and peacocks and
every time I'd see it I'd use it as a
time travelers device and i'll use it to
like zoom off in two different worlds
and your friends sister but somehow
fancy cell phones and our watches and
our ipads don't do that anymore they've
they've stopped us from dreaming they've
stopped us from really imagining so at
some point in art school like most
people in art school I decided to I
decided to wait yeah so at some point in
art school I decided that I wanted to
actually face my fears I wanted to stop
avoiding technology and I had to face it
in anza 21st century and so I started
looking at a series of experiments with
narratives for children on the iPad and
other other kind of technology story
mashups so at first I was experimenting
with augmented reality for a little
while and then eventually I started
working on a book for children a series
called koya on the ipad now
and it's early days it was which was
last year which means I just graduated
about six months ago oh yeah but in its
early days it I didn't have an iPad so I
actually made the entire story board of
the book on this little cardboard iPad
and I would like pretend that I was
actually using it I be like ting ting
ting ting and all of his off and it
worked and soon a few months later
actually you know borrowed some money
from my mum my borscht and wrote the
book and we launched queer as a book on
the iPad so I'm just going to short you
so it says place your fingers upon each
light and so when I do it reads my hand
and it opens up the world of coil
so this book belongs to and so what I
need to do then is I type in my name and
I actually become a character in the
book and through the entire story I get
letters the drop down and say dear
Shiloh and also like you know if the
iPad knows where you live because of GPS
and I think that's actually quite
exciting of course very usable very
functional I find my way in sao paulo
because i have gps but it's also really
magical right like it's super crazy that
this device knows where you are on the
planet at any given moment that's a
little scary but also really exciting so
here you keep getting these letters that
I actually delivered to your address and
I think that's pretty exciting for a
child as well um now when I say magic I
don't mean like wizards and Dragons I
mean this childhood magic head your
fireflies in the jar for some reason
when I was a little girl I thought that
fireflies in the job is fascinating so
here you actually need to tilt your
screen and let the fireflies out say
tilt it and you tilt it and you tell fit
and the fireflies come out so with the
interactions we're also trying to not
just you stash but also use all the
things with the iPad device you know
moving things around shaking it in knows
where you I it can it can potentially
connect people all over the world at the
same time so over here you let the
fireflies out by testing it and then
they illuminate your way through the
rest of the book so here when I was a
child I thought that an entire galaxy
could be contained inside a marble so
you dragged and dropped marble in and it
actually opens up this map now fantasy
books have always had maps right but
these maps have been static they've been
just printed on a piece of paper but now
we can actually create fantasy max they
remove them and grow and grow as you
move along
story so while queer one which we
launched last year in December was all
about magic and technology where to is
really about the earth so I think that a
big problem in the last 10 years has
been of 10 20 years has been is that
kids have been glued to their big clunky
pcs at home just like clicking away when
I was a kid I used to go around walking
and reading books and like dark corners
and under trees into all kinds of stuff
but Kim's in the last 20 years have just
been completely completely can glued
into their homes so now actually with
mobile technology but becomes quite
exciting is that kids can take the
technology outside their house with them
and with where we try to create a lot of
interactions that actually bridge this
gap between technology and the natural
world so when I was a little girl I well
this is obviously love it when I
involves a little girl I used to collect
all kinds of shells will sticks and
stones and and pebbles and I had these
beautiful collections but somehow
because of these big clunky pcs in video
games kids don't do that as much anymore
so inquire we've created these
interactions where at some point in the
narrative as the children in the book
are on a quest you need to go out on a
quest to and with each chapter you need
to actually go outside and take
photographs with your iPad of different
natural objects around your home so what
you do essentially is create a digital
collection of your little little natural
objects that you found so for example
over here you need to go and take a
picture of a seed and once you've done
that it actually becomes part of your
library you can potentially put it up
online and so a child in India could put
up a picture of peacock in one chapter
and a child in Sao Paulo could put up a
picture of a beautiful exotic Brazilian
bird and the energy fighting you know so
for as much of nature's world that is
visible there's also so much
so in this particular part this is this
is based in in the Himalayas in India
where there's this value of flowers and
they say that if you wander off too far
you will be abducted by these beautiful
observers so over here you enter into
the valley
see all about these upsells after the
kind of like names or fairies and of
course the entire world knows about
limps and fairies but very few people
outside of India know about the Indian
counterparts the observers so here you
actually need to take your iPad outside
and with the use of augmented reality
you put your iPad in front in front of
one of the flowers in your neighborhood
and even find the Pixies as a no as a
digital layer on top of it that live
inside that flower or you could go to a
piece of bark and and put your iPad in
front of it and you can see the magical
creature through again a digital they
are using augmented reality that lives
in that bark and I think that's really
exciting making nature's invisible world
visible through technology other
interactions also do this kind of thing
they like at one point your screen is
full of flowers and so you need to make
the sound of wind like and blow all the
flowers away and then you can read the
next chapter at another point is full of
touch me nerves and so you need to
actually touch all of them away and it
opens up the next page now India
actually India always has this
connection with the natural world in
India we have all these ancient
beautiful rituals and symbols that are
all about celebrating and loving the
natural world and I wish that that all
of this could come into the digital
world somehow i would offer flowers to
the digital world and so each image in
korea is actually a thick web of symbols
and myths and and all kinds of things
from from Indian mythology for example
at hand that you saw in the front that's
the hand of hum saath that protects
doorways and so in the app it protects
the doorway of the app or in India every
morning women across make these
beautiful symbols and kind of labyrinths
it's called coulomb every every single
morning at five o'clock in the morning
and it invokes a certain energy into the
house and so in Korea we have an
interaction where you need to actually
just draw a simple on a piece of paper
and put your iPad in front of it and it
detects the symbol that you've drawn and
then invokes the next chapter so we've
really tried to see how we can bring you
know ritual culture beauty all of these
things back into the digital world
I'm still a technophobe so what we
really see is is vast vast ocean of
possibilities right I feel like moving
forward we are going to be using
technology not killed culture not to
kill magic but actually to really really
enable it and really tell stories across
the world I grew up reading in India I
grew up reading our cheese and harry
potter and i think it's such a shame
that i had to read only that and i
didn't read any brazilian stories but
now what we actually have is a digital
universal bookstore where people across
the world can share their stories
but also I mean yeah like the idea of a
book is actually quite quite new because
in India we've always had super
multimedia heavy storytelling like
shadow Pavan working with shadow poverty
in Kerala these are the potatoes in
Bengal and they actually paint and sing
sing through their paintings so now with
actually this kind of medium it might be
interesting to see how one could bring
back and revive and and also let these
kind of traditions grow across the world
it's been quite amazing because I set
out in search of magic in what I ended
up finding was a great deal of magic in
my own life so a talk that I gave at the
end conference got chosen by dead calm
and suddenly like my life was flooded
with over you know 800,000 almost
million views on Ted calm I got to show
my app to Steve Wozniak who said that
artists are as important as
technologists which I saw us igniting
and and basically it's been amazing like
sometimes I feel like I'm Alice in an
app store wonderland but i do believe i
believe that there are some Mad Hatter's
out there as well thank you
you